Common WordPress Errors and How to Fix Them Safely

WordPress powers a huge share of the web, and the same handful of failures account for most emergencies. The good news is that nearly all of them are recoverable. The bad news is that panicked fixes — deleting files, restoring the wrong backup, reinstalling over a live site — routinely turn a small problem into a large one.

Before anything else: take a backup. Files and database, both, before you change a thing. If a fix goes wrong you want a way back.

The White Screen of Death

A blank white page usually means PHP hit a fatal error and stopped, with error display switched off so nothing is shown.

Check your server's PHP error log first — it normally names the exact file and line. The cause is typically a plugin or theme conflict after an update, or exhausted memory. Deactivate plugins to find the culprit; if you cannot reach the admin, rename the plugins folder over SFTP to deactivate them all, then restore it and re-enable one at a time.

Error Establishing a Database Connection

WordPress cannot reach its database. There are three realistic causes:

• Wrong credentials in wp-config.php — common right after a site move.
• The database server is down or has hit its connection limit.
• Corrupted tables, which is rarer and usually follows a crash or a disk filling up.

Check credentials first, then whether the database service is running. If tables are corrupt, repair them from a database tool before considering a restore — and never restore a database over a live store without exporting current orders first.

500 Internal Server Error

A generic message covering many causes. The most frequent are a malformed .htaccess file, an exhausted PHP memory limit, or a fatal error in a plugin.

Rename .htaccess to .htaccess-old and reload. If the site returns, regenerate the file by saving your permalink settings. Otherwise increase the memory limit and check the error log. As always, the log tells you the answer far faster than guesswork.

Login Loop or Locked Out of Admin

You enter correct credentials and are returned to the login screen. Usually this is a cookie or URL mismatch — siteurl and home in the database not matching the address you are visiting, or a mix of HTTP and HTTPS. Correcting those values, or defining them in wp-config.php, resolves most cases. A plugin conflict can also be responsible, so deactivating plugins is the next step.

Memory Limit Exhausted

"Allowed memory size exhausted" means PHP ran out of room. Raising the limit is the immediate fix, but treat a site that suddenly needs far more memory as a symptom. Frequently something is loading unbounded data — the database equivalent of which we discuss in why sites slow down as they grow.

Mixed Content Warnings After Moving to HTTPS

The padlock disappears because pages still reference HTTP assets. Update the URLs stored in the database with a proper search-and-replace tool that handles serialised data — a plain SQL find-and-replace will corrupt serialised options and create a new problem.

How to Avoid Most of This

• Stage your updates. Test plugin and core updates somewhere that is not your live site.
• Back up automatically and verify restores. An untested backup is a hope, not a plan.
• Keep plugins few and current. Most conflicts come from abandoned or overlapping plugins.
• Keep error logging on — writing to a log, not displaying to visitors.
• Use a decent host with adequate PHP memory and database resources.

This is precisely what a maintenance plan covers, and it is far cheaper than emergency recovery. We set out the routine in our website maintenance checklist, and deliver it through maintenance and support.

When to Stop and Call Someone

Stop if you are being asked to edit database tables directly, if the site has been hacked, if you do not have a working backup, or if a store is taking orders and you cannot afford to lose any. At that point the cost of a mistake exceeds the cost of help.

We handle exactly these situations through website troubleshooting and bug fixes, and longer term we often rebuild fragile sites properly with WordPress development — as we did for a restaurant group's multisite.

Something broken right now? Describe the error message and what changed just before it appeared — those two details solve most cases quickly.

If the site has been hacked rather than merely broken, treat it as a separate job: our hacked website cleanup service removes the infection and closes the hole it came through, and if the symptom is emails that never arrive, that is usually a sending problem covered by email deliverability.